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WizKids Announces New D&D Board Game And Minis Set

WizKids is all about efficiency. Like for HeroClix , you get your minis already assembled and painted. That sort of efficiency goes all the way to their press releases. Like here, we’ve got the announcement about a new Dungeons & Dragons board game as well as a new set of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures.

The game is called Assault of the Giants. It’s designed by Andrew Parks and seats 2-6 players. Take control of one of the 6 types of giants and fight it out to see who should be in charge of all of giantkind. Use your giants to assault settlements in order to get resources like food, treasure, ore, and runes.

As for the miniatures, they represent characters in Wizard of the Coast’s Storm King’s Thunder storyline event. This is the fifth set in the Icons of the Realms line, bringing 44 new miniatures to the ranks of available figures.

The miniatures are due in stores in September, but you’re gonna have to wait until Spring 2017 for the board game.

I was born at a very young age. I plan on living forever. So far, so good.

Emery Calame

$99 sounds like a LOT for one of those Ravenloft/Drizzt/Ashardolon/Temple format boxed games.

JG Jenkins

The description indicates this is an entirely new game wherein the players play *as* the giants. Looks like it has some Euro elements like resource management and victory points to go with the Ameritrash toy factor of large giant models.

Ghool

Even so, $100US for that is really steep. The minis might be pre-paints, and there’s only 14 of them. But yeesh that’s still a chunk of change!

Anne Thornton

I doubt they are prepainted for that price, given the cost of the minis for their D&D Attack Wing line – you wouldn’t be able to get 14 of the giants for that price (or through the regular minis line, either), not to mention the other components.
The previous board games selling for ~$50 did include 30 or so unpainted minis, but they were almost all small or medium, whereas 5e giants will be large and huge. The Dungeon Command packs had 12 (iirc) prepainted minis for about $30 (again, iirc, they were higher here in Canada anyway), but I don’t know how comparable it would be to the new game.
Certainly prices are only going up; that’s hardly unique to WizKids.

Ghool

How much was Temple of Elemental Evil? I know the others retail for $75CAD where I work, and that’s a publisher set price.
Jumping from $50US to $100US from one game to the next is a huge jump in price, regardless of the size of miniatures.

Anne Thornton

While the earlier games are still selling for about $70-80 CAD at my FLGS, they have ToEE selling for $100 IIRC. Which is why I picked up a (complete, but slightly) used copy on eBay for $40 USD. Unfortunately, everything released since last summer has been significantly more pricey for us here. I think Imperial Assault is selling for close to $130 CAD at the same store… I’m afraid that Giants game is going to be similarly priced unless the exchange rate _really_ improves in our favour by next spring.

odinsgrandson

We’re looking too much at the number of minis. Because 14 minis for $100 is low, right?

These minis are quite large- the shorter ones are 4″ tall and the larger ones are 5.5″ tall.

That might not be sinking in- but 5″ tall minis are really big. I have a dreadnought here, and he’s less than 3″ tall. I’ve got a Reaper giant that’s a bit larger, and he’s about 3″ tall.

54mm minis are about 2″ tall. 80mm minis are only 3 inches tall.

From what they’re saying, the smallest of these minis would be just a bit larger than 100 mm. We are very quickly reaching larger action figure sizes.

Now- if you’re only interested in this game, then you could have done with smaller minis. But, like GW’s recent games, the crossover with D&D should be pretty compelling.

Green_Lumux

if it comes with all the giant minis from that expansion, it’s probably not that bad of a deal in retrospect. I have never bought any of these prepaints before, but I excited by all the giants and have spent the weekend scouring for the best deal to buy them…

best I could come up with was 11.50 USD per booster, which may or may not even have the actual giants I want in it… but even at that point to get 14 boosters hoping to strike gold runs a cost of 161 USD before shipping and taxes etc.

I just hope the quality is getting better, one thing that has really bothered me is the fact they use all these gorgeous renders of the models on the packaging and advertising, the finished products look NOTHING like what they advertise…

Davos Seaworth

It’s almost like Wizkids/Hasbro finally got around to noticing the neverending goldmine of minis-based Kickstarters and said, “Hey, I bet we could get $100 too!” Unfortunately they kinda whiffed on the minis-per-dollar ratio, ensuring this goes over like a lead balloon.